Where Does My Book Start?Finding The Inciting Incident

One of the things that surprised me most when I started editing was the number of times I recommended a writer change where they started their book. Reading interviews with authors and talking to authors—maybe because I was looking for it—I noticed this was a recurring theme. Why is that? How do we tell where our books start? Not the hook that draws readers to keep reading, but the story itself.

Inciting Incident

A friend of mine tells the story of her first book, about a Victorian train crash that leads to mystery and romance. She had been sending the manuscript out and querying agents and editors for ages before one took it. Her first suggestion? “Chop the first seven chapters where you set up characters and their backstory and start with the train crash.” For this book, the train crash was the “inciting incident”: the event that kicked off the rest of the book.

Usually when you hear writers talking about an inciting incident, it is kicking off a conflict, or something random or shocking has happened: a spouse finds out their partner is cheating on them; aliens arrive on Earth; a building full of people blows up. Whatever that incident is, the main characters are somehow forced to change by it or respond to it: go on a quest; fight the evil emperor; become the chosen one; decide how to pick up the pieces of their relationship. That incident, and the main character’s choice of response, is your story arc in a nutshell.

When the Incident Occurs

If you look at it that way, it makes sense that the inciting incident is going to happen in Chapter 1. A character doesn’t have something to react to, and a story can’t get started, until the incident occurs. But our instinct as writers seems to almost always be to explain how the incident happens. Why does it happen? What led up to it? Suddenly, the incident is later and later in the book. I once had to regretfully tell an author that her story didn’t start until Chapter 14.

One simple way to tell when your inciting incident occurs (and if each chapter supports the story arc’s progress) is to do a one-line summary of each of your chapters. If you had to sum up everything that happens in Chapter 1 for an outline, would it read: “Dave finds a dead body” or “Dave describes his childhood to his therapist.” The only way the second one is an inciting incident is if Dave walks out to pay the bill, realizes he left his phone in the room and when he goes in, the therapist is dead. And even then, we’re probably still going to need to do some tweaking. Is Dave’s childhood important to the rest of the story?

Your Genre’s Incident

What genre are you writing? That’s going to help you make some decisions about your incident. If it’s a thriller or mystery then it isn’t uncommon to start with the crime. How many tv shows have you watched where they start with the innocent dog walker finding a dead body? Or the detectives getting called out to the crime scene, ruining a day off? Same for books. I just finished J.D. Robb’s Fury In Death where it could be argued there were two inciting incidents: the first murder Eve Dallas investigates, which starts Eve (the series main character) on her hunt for justice; and the event that causes the killer to become a killer. Robb starts the book in the past with the incident that creates the killer. The book could have started either way, and a more typical beginning would have been with Eve standing over the first victim. But Robb has been writing this series for quite a while and chose to mix things up for a different hook to the book.

What about The Ending Writes Itself? Still a murder mystery, this book by Evelyn Clarke, aims for a slightly more “cozy mystery” vibe. To that end it starts with chapters that introduce each of the characters, giving the book a much slower pace. It makes you think back to Agatha Christie and other Golden Age writers who don’t usually kill someone off until at least a third of the way through the book (though I think it actually takes Clarke a little longer). Same genre as J.D.Robb, different subgenre, different pacing and different reader expectations set from the first chapter.

A popular romance trope is when one of the main characters returns to their hometown after something happens. Maybe they are back to take care of a family member, maybe they’ve inherited something, maybe their career in the big city blew up. But now they’re back and it’s a bit of an awkward fish-out-of-water scenario. Whatever it was that sent them home is the inciting incident, but it never starts the book. This trope always starts with the main character moving to a new place—we meet them when they are already responding to the inciting incident. Because in the romance genre, it is the characters’ growth and response that is the heart of the story. We’ll find out what the inciting incident was through flashback or conversations, but it isn’t the point of the book the way a murder is to a mystery book.

Where Does My Book Start?

If you’re still not sure where your book starts, here’s a good way to find out: tell someone about it. If anyone knows you’re writing a book, you’ve been asked “what’s it about?” Tell them. Not feeling up to sharing? Tell yourself the story and record it so you remember. More often than not, when we’re telling our story to someone else (even if it’s the dog), we aren’t going to start by describing our character’s backstory. We’re going to start by jumping straight to the  good stuff: “There are these two co-workers who can’t stand each other and they’re trapped on a tropical island.” In that one sentence you realize you don’t need to start with five chapters of your character’s work history and morning routine. She’s stuck on an island with no sunscreen, no Starbucks, and a co-worker who mansplains the job she created! How does she survive, let alone get off the island without killing him? (also, if anyone is writing a story like this, let me know, I would love to edit it!)

Without a doubt, we as authors need to know our characters' backstories. We need to know the how, the why, the when, the who, the what, of as much as we can think of. But here’s the catch: our readers don’t always need to know what we need to know. Let them jump straight into the heart of the story and hang on to the “before” chapters you wrote. Maybe they’ll help you with flashbacks along the way. Maybe they’ll help you get to know your characters’ motivations better. But ask yourself if just because you need to know it, does your reader need to know it?

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